Let's workshop this poem about a mother confronting the shock of what she has allowed to transpire in the case of her son, now a grown gamer in her basement for whom she buys bulk Cheetos
Basement Gamer Bulk Cheetos
She never expected
to have to clear up her motherly fib:
how so many deer and skunks
misshapen along the road were
“sillies napping in silly spots,”
figuring beneath words
that experience—something
(peers, reflection)—would have
set the man straight by now.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)